Well. We all know about the “new” Phase5.. he sold me 2 of the Blizzard PPC2 PCBs that I found out was faulty.. no ground connected. and he refused to refund or send new working pcbs.

And at Amiga32 he showed the Blizzard 1260 PCBs. saying that they would go to production any day.

now still one year after.. no production. so this summer I started to actually do a reverse engineer of it, just like I done with the A3640 and Amiga 1200..

Is this ILLEGAL? well.. simply put: no. especially if the the board states that it IS a copy and not claiming to be the real thing. Something I never done in any of my work.

NO original files was used, all is a manual work. Compare making spareparts for your Volvo. fully ok!

So starting with a B1260 with all components taken off:

First step is to make the copper more visible:

BUT! Thing is. SPRINT that I am using as it is nice to draw traces above a scanned picture. actually only handles 4 layers. ALSO only allow scanned pictures on top and bottom layers. I need to go down to the inner layers first. do them as top/bottom layers and then move them to the internal layer. lets show the INNER layers.. and HOW do I do this? simply sand more… :) and as this PCB is quite “see through” I just sand off the copperlayer you see.

Now I just need to scan this. and do all tracing.

and so I have done.. all signaltraces is done. and PRETTY verified not really sure yet so I will do more tests.. but I just want you all to have a nice “christmaspresent” the 1st of december.

sprint file could be used for troubleshooting broken traces.

you CANNOT make any pcb out of this. as the B1260 is a 6 layer board and I have only worked the 4 signal layers. I will do the inner power/gnd layer some day aswell.

but so far.. this is propably what Salvador have anyway. a PCB with no working power anyway..

How about mach chips? well. this is a different story.. I know the chinese can read the chips. this is however not legal unless someone reads it. makes a spec of it and then someone else makes chips out of that specs…

however why do this? old outdated tech. there are new promising 060 solutions coming anyway. so lets just have this info as a repairtool.

6 thoughts on “Reverse engineering of the Blizzard 1260 PCB”

first of all, thank you for all this painstaking work! It’s really appreciable to see people like you keeping this old hardware alive.

Now, I have a very specific problem, and I’m a bit lost here:

I recently acquired a Blizzard 1260 (converted from 1240) along with a 32MB SIMM and a Rev.5 CPU. The conversion was very badly done. Huge solderblobs, charred soldermask, flux residue everywhere. However, I’ve eben able to clean up most of the mess and have the card running rock stable at 66 MHz.
A few days ago, I bought a SCSI Kit IV on Amibay. Seller states it’s fully teated and I believe him. The SCSI part is properly detected and shows latest ROM version 8.5. BUT, whatever size of SIMM module I put in the SCSI Kit, only 2 MB of it are being detected.

Can this be due to a broken trace on the 1260? Do you perhaps have any hint as to where to look?

Hi, great job.
I’m just comparing reversed engineered schematics with my faulty 1260 card. I’d like to provide corrections.
I also have faulty Bppc card.
I’d like to try some repairs. I’m looking for any help.
I’m thinking about moving chips from my faulty BPpc card to your pcb without ground and building ground layer from reverse engineered my faulty bppc pcb.